Citrix Systems has invested in PaaS (platform-as-a-service) startup CumuLogic, as it sees enterprises embrace new types of applications specifically designed to run in the cloud, the company said on Tuesday.

The investment was made by Citrix's Startup Accelerator, which invests in early-stage startups. Citrix did not divulge the amount of the investment.

What attracted Citrix to CumuLogic was the company's "ability to bridge between traditional datacenters and clouds at the application level," the company said in a statement.

PaaS offerings are the middle layer of a cloud-based software stack, according to market research company Gartner. They sit between the underlying system infrastructure (OSes, networks, virtualization and storage) and the application software, it said.

With CumuLogic's platform, enterprises can deploy and manage any kind of Java application -- whether mobile, Web or enterprise applications -- on private, public or hybrid clouds, according to the company's website.

CumuLogic calls its technology a cloud application management platform. It includes features such as autoscaling, monitoring and metering. The latter allows enterprises to track application usage so they can properly charge the correct departments.

The platform doesn't require a proprietary software development kit or framework, so application developers can choose the environment they want to use, such as Eclipse or NetBeans, according to CumuLogic.

The platform also supports multiple underlying clouds and virtualized environments, including CloudStack, Eucalyptus, OpenStack and VMware vSphere in private clouds; and Amazon EC2 and HP Cloud Services public clouds.

PaaS will be a core part of cloud computing architectures, and its evolution will affect a majority of enterprises and software vendors, Gartner said earlier this year. Both camps must start building expertise, it said.

Just like most new areas, there a number of startups that want to make a name for themselves in the PaaS sector. CumuLogic's competitors include Engine Yard, dotCloud, Appfog and CloudBees.

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